RFP Management system

Question

I have a small business, where we often do proposals in response to RFP's (Request for Proposal, aka, Request for bid/information/solution, invitation to bid, etc.)
These often have a myriad of sections - they want introductions, resume's, and their various appendixes, cover sheets, spreadsheets, timetables, and other stuff.
Managing this in Word, GoogleDocs, or other word processor is difficult.

I am looking for a simple (preferably free or really cheap) system where I can take documents of various formats (like fillable PDF or spreadsheets) and drop them in a certain order, then finally combine them all into one document, or document set for submission.

• Page numbers, and a table of contents would be great.
• OS is not relevant. I have Mac, Windows, Linux, and I have a web browser.

Answer 1

I would suggest taking a look at the Sphinx document generation system originally written to document python but it can be and is used extenensivly for other document generation.

With it you can store a set of sections, e.g. Team Member CVs in reStructuredText format and pull them together with a hierarchical structure from a single master page or toctree file with the order/structure as you need and then generate your final document. You can define and use document styles and produce output in any or all of:

• HTML (including Windows HTML Help),
• LaTeX (for printable PDF versions),
• ePub,
• Texinfo,
• manual pages,
• plain text

With extensive cross references, tables of content, index, etc.

• Free, Gratis & Open Source
• Cross Platform
• Available free for commercial use BSD licence
• Diagrams, plots and images can all be included.
• Installed under python which is itself gratis, cross platform and usable for commercial use.

I would also suggest using a version control system such as Mercurial to allow you to store all of your versions of the specific pages while retaining the history of the changes.

Answer 2

At work we use dokuwiki. It is not perfect, but works.

I use the wiki daily. There is a WYSIWYG plugin (but I don't like it and don't use it).

You get a simple history for each page: You see who has edited the page at what time and you can show a diff.

You get fulltext search. Maybe not for the content of PDF files, but for the textual wiki content.